EDITORIAL

Reform: It Takes All Kinds

It looks as if Pat Buchanan will bolt the Republican Party to
raise his pitchfork with the Reform Party. He should not get the
Reform nomination without a fight.

Buchanan reflects many of the Reform Party's concerns about "free
trade," the flight of blue-collar jobs overseas, the increasing power
of multinational corporations and the surrender of American
sovereignty. Also, as A.V. Krebs notes on page 7, Buchanan, with his
"Farmer's Bill of Rights," is one of the few candidates with a
credible farm policy and he is the only one with a populist approach
to the crisis facing family farmers in the United States. However,
his positions on social issues such as abortion and his call for
"culture war" repel many Reformers as well as other moderate
Americans and distract from his positions on economic issues.

Reform Party founder Ross Perot reportedly is encouraging
Buchanan, but as much as I'd like to see Buchanan strip 10 or 15
percent of the vote away from the Republican nominee in the general
election, his carrying the Reform banner would not be best for the
long-term interest of the Reform Party or reform in general.

The Reform Party is just getting over Perot, whose ego and money
built the party and left it with a ballot line in 21 states, $12.6
million in federal matching funds and an opportunity to raise issues
that the Republicans and Democrats won't touch.

Commentators from the mainstream media are able to dismiss
Buchanan as a social reactionary and an isolationist who veers on the
brink of racism. His nomination would cause most moderate and
progressive populists to write off the Reform Party. The party would
be better off with a candidate who could articulate the arguments
against "free trade" and for the rights of American workers without
resorting to slurs against Jews, Chinese, Latinos or other ethnic
groups.

The now-and-again right-wing columnist and TV commentator has a
penchant for zingers in his pronouncements on public policy. Examples
include his call at the 1992 Republican convention for a "culture
war" to be waged by the right, his defense of Nazi war criminals and
Holocaust revisionism, his Jew-baiting and recently his proposal to
close America's southern borders and deny statehood to Puerto Rico
while opening our northern borders -- even offering statehood to
renegade Canadian provinces. Urging immigration reform, he
proclaimed, "Jose, we ain't gonna let you in again!" and, fulminating
on foreign policy, he promised that if China does not open up to U.S.
trade, it will have sold its "last pair of chopsticks in any mall in
the United States of America."

Those lines may get cheers in some quarters, but they undermine
his image as a populist contender for the White House. Populism
should not be a politics of division. Indeed the strength of populism
should be its ability to reach across ethnic groups and regional
borders to bring people together for their common good.

Many commentators seem to believe that the Reform nomination would
be Buchanan's for the asking. However, many Reformers are
uncomfortable with Buchanan's rightwing views on social issues. Some
of them fled the Republican Party because of its rightward lurch, and
they hope to position Reform as a centrist alternative to the
Republicans.

Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who as the only Reform Party
statewide officeholder has nudged aside Perot as the party's de facto
leader, reportedly does not think Buchanan would be the best
standard-bearer. Instead, Ventura has been promoting former
Connecticut independent Governor Lowell Weicker and New York
dealmaker Donald Trump.

Weicker served three terms in the U.S. Senate as a moderate
Republican (and beat George W. Bush's uncle, Prescott Bush Jr., in a
1982 GOP primary) before being unseated in 1988 by Democrat Joseph
Lieberman. In 1990 Weicker came back to be elected governor as an
independent, defeating, as Salon's Bruce Shapiro noted, a
younger Republican who promised ill-defined conservative compassion
and a Democrat who was too beholden to the party's funders and
power-brokers to run a vital campaign. Weicker supports campaign
finance reform and debt reduction over tax reduction, but his staunch
support for free trade makes him suspect in the Reform Party, as well
as his call to ban handgun ownership.

Ventura's courting of Trump is inexplicable for a party that
stands for cleaning up campaign finance laws and the elimination of
the influence of lobbyists and special interests. Trump is a real
estate developer who built his career largely on lavish bipartisan
campaign contributions in the 1980s that resulted in massive tax
breaks that helped him develop Grand Hyatt, Trump Tower and other
properties. About the only thing that could be said in Trump's favor
is that he could pay his own way, as Perot did.

A better Reform candidate would be Ralph Nader, who reportedly is
considering another run for president. In 1996, running as the Green
Party candidate and receiving virtually no press coverage, he
received 684,902 votes, only 0.71 percent of the total, but he
finished fourth, behind Perot. Of course, the notoriously frugal
consumer advocate spent less than $5,000 on the campaign. As readers
of his column in The Progressive Populist will recognize, he
agrees with most of the Reform Party's economic platform and carries
little of the baggage on social issues. In fact, he took some flak in
1996 for his reluctance to be drawn into debates on gay rights and
other social issues.

Reform Party rules call for the nominee to be selected by mail
ballot next July. The party is on the ballot in 21 states, and party
rules require presidential candidates to collect signatures to
qualify the party for the ballot in other states. The Reform Party
must gain 5 percent of the popular vote to maintain its $12.6 million
share of FEC funding for 2004. Buchanan is showing double-digit
support as the hypothetical Reform candidate in surveys. But any
qualified candidate with $25 million to spend on a campaign that
features straight talk on fair trade, campaign finance reform, fiscal
responsibility, environmental protection, sustainable agriculture and
access to health care ought to be able to get well beyond the 5
percent threshold they need to hold onto federal matching funds. If
they put up the right candidate -- and there is room in the Reform
Party for a progressive populist candidate -- the voters might
surprise the pundits again, like they did last November with Jesse
Ventura in Minnesota.

Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Martin Meehan, D-Mass., got
the House of Representatives on September 14 again to pass the
campaign finance reform bill, only to turn it over to Senators
Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., and John McCain, R-Ariz., for a much more
uncertain future. The first act of Feingold and McCain was to drop
one of the key elements of their bill -- the regulation of so-called
"issue advocacy'' advertising by special interest groups.

McCain and Feingold pulled the teeth from the Senate version in
the hope of making it acceptable to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott
and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who have blocked previous
attempts to get campaign reforms through the Senate.

The House bill already was relatively weak but the Republicans
have made it clear they are not going to give up their advantage in
"issue advocacy'' ads, which allow monied special interest groups to
get around the limits on campaign contributions by running their own
independent attack ads.

The new version of McCain-Feingold, while weaker, would ban the
unlimited donations to political parties known as "soft money''
contributions. It is a start, and it appears that nothing more
meaningful will get passed while Lott and McConnell command
leadership positions in the Senate. The real cure -- public financing
of campaigns -- will have to wait for a new Congress that is
convinced that there is a problem with the way we sell our elected
officials to the highest bidders. Changing that mindset is up to the
rest of us.